In transmission, as we’ve said, we’ve just started off that business and right off the bat, we’ve got very high-quality partners to come along with us. For our existing other renewable energy assets, we continue to be in conversations with a number of different investors. And as you know, for our first RTC project, we have got Mitsui as a partner with a 49% stake. And we anticipate that we will be selling more assets, potentially both to them as well as to other investors as we go forward.
Operator: The next question will come from Justin Clare with ROTH Capital Partners.
Justin Clare: So first off here, you signed 1 gigawatt of PPAs just all in the last quarter here, so a pretty significant amount of progress there. So wondering, have you seen a meaningful change in the demand for power and an acceleration in your ability to get these PPAs signed? I was wondering just how broad-based is the demand? And then how should we think about the time it takes to go from winning at an auction to getting a PPA signed given the current environment?
Sumant Sinha: Yes. Justin, look, in the — yes. Sorry, I was just answering that. Yes, in the 1 gigawatt, there are 400 megawatts worth of corporate PPAs, which we have talked about. And 600 megawatts were PPAs that were LOAs that we had earlier, which have now got converted into PPAs. And so those are the 1 gigawatt — that’s how the 1 gigawat shows up. But fundamentally, I think your question is around the momentum that we are seeing in the market right now in terms of power demand, and therefore, the frequency of bids and therefore, accretion to our portfolio. I think that power demand, as you know, in India has been growing very robustly at about 6% per year right now. And there has been, I would say, a fairly significant shortage of power in India over the last many months and as we look forward that is likely to continue to be the case.
And therefore, distribution utilities and corporates are both looking to procure new sources of energy. And renewables being the cheapest source of electricity right now becomes the obvious candidate. Now SECI is now coming up with a number of auctions. In fact, there have been a couple of auctions that we have submitted first on bids for. These are all the round-the-clock power type of projects. So the more complicated projects, and those bids will be happening very soon in the next month or so. And then behind that also we see a lot of other bids that have now been teed up by SECI, working in conjunction with the states with the DISCOMs. And so we talked about the fact that we do see imminently about 5 gigawatts of RTC auctions coming to the market.
Some of those, as I said, we’ve already submitted first on bids for. Some are coming up very soon. And behind that, there’s another 8 gigawatts of RTC auctions that will be coming up. So our sense is that power demand is now beginning to translate into bidding activity, and now the bids that are happening, SECI is doing those with a fairly clear identification of the off-taker rather than to the bid and then go find the off-taker. And so therefore, we expect that the process from bidding to signing of PPAs will go relatively more smoothly than it has in the past. And the past, of course, as we all know, was disrupted by the COVID situation. That is now all getting normalized. So we do expect these bids to translate relatively soon into PPAs. Typically, it used to take 3 months earlier pre-COVID, and we expect that, that will come back to that same time frame.
And then, as you know, we have 2 years to construct the projects once the PPAs are signed. So any bid that happen now in the remainder of this financial year of FY ’23 will need to be built out by financial year ’25. So that’s really where we are right now.
